Office Depot Stitches Together the Customer Journey Across Multiple Touchpoints

Office Depot Stitches Together the Customer Journey Across Multiple Touchpoints

Martine Vesco joined Talend in 2016 as a Senior Customer Marketing Manager. In this role, Martine develops and maintains a trusted advisor relationship with key customer contacts and creates Customer Reference programs as well as communities.
Prior to Talend, Martine held a number of senior positions in customer marketing at leading software companies such as Dassault Systèmes, Business Objects and Workday.

Centralizing Data to Respond to Retail Challenges

Traditionally, Office Depot’s European sales were primarily sourced through an offline, mail-order catalog model drive by telemarketing activities. The company has since moved to a hybrid retail model, combining offline and online shopping, which required a data consolidation strategy that optimized the different channels. Additionally, the company’s myriad of backend systems and disparate supply chain data collected from across Europe had become difficult to analyze.

Using Talend, Office Depot can now ingest data from its vast collection of operational systems. The architecture includes an on-premise Hadoop cluster using Hortonworks, Talend Data Integration, and Data Quality to perform checks and quality control on data before ingesting it into the Hub’s data lake.

Powering Use Cases from Supply Chain to Finance

Integrating online and offline data results in a unified, 360-degree view of the customer and a clear picture of the customer journey. Office Depot can now create more-specific audience segments based on how customers prefer to buy, and tailor strategies to reach the most valuable consumers whether they buy online or in-store. They can compare different offline customer experiences to see how they are influenced by digital ads. Customer service operators have complete information on a customer, so they can talk to them as they know their details.

Office Depot’s data hub approach also provides high-quality data to all back-office functions throughout the organization, including supply chain and finance. Office Depot can now integrate data from the range of supply chain back-end systems in use in various countries, and answer questions such as which distribution center has the most efficient pick-line and why; or which center is in the risky position of having the least amount of stock for the best-selling products.